Fiction or Non?

November 19, 2009

I’ve been in a bit of a quandry lately over how to respond to some of the wonderful comments my dear readers are posting on this blog, in response to my links on certain social networks and sending in emails to me. There seems to be some confusion over whether the stories I write are fiction, or if they’re autobiographical.

I was touched (and tickled!) by how many of you asked me if I’d recovered from my fall after reading the story, “Falling in the Shower”. I was also somewhat relieved by a couple of comments on “The Cowboy Rides Away” from readers who obviously mistook that blog for a work of fiction. Since the confusion seems to work in my favor either way, I almost hate to dispel it! But in all fairness to characters that appear in my blogs and to my readers, I think I should address the issue.

To rescue the memory of my sainted mother from the slightest imputation of harshness towards her children, I have to assure my readers that “Falling” was a piece of short fiction. Yes, I fell in the shower while washing out hair dye; yes, I almost fell on Slevin, who to this day still won’t lie on the bathroom rug while I shower, even though the falling incident was two years ago (hehehe!). But my dead mother didn’t appear, and if she had she would have rushed over to help me up, ewjabooed me in the best mama-loves-you way, and paid for me to get my hair colored by a professional in a salon where there was no risk of injury to her baby girl.

For future reference, if anyone is really interested in whether or not a story is true or just that – a story – you can look right under the title of the blog. You’ll see categories there. If I’ve categorized it as “Autobiographical”, you’ll know it’s true. If I’ve categorized it as “Short Fiction”, you’ll know that it’s probably, mostly, pseudo, kinda made up.

Seriously, I can’t say that all of my short fiction is or will be drawn purely from my imagination. My life has been too fantastical not to pull experiences and events out of it to use in fiction. But you can be fairly certain that if a blog is categorized as “Short Fiction”, whatever I said didn’t necessarily happen in that way to those people at that time. Or it might have never happened at all. (Ah, fiction – a license to tell a whopper!)

Fair? Fair enough, don’t you think?

Hugs to all! Thank you so much for the outpouring of support you’ve offered as I soldier on down the Literary Trail.

Thanks for the heads up, dearie! Maybe it is a tribute to your writing that we can’t tell the difference. Either that, or we all think you have lived a really “wild” life, lol! I do so love your writing!